Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in the context of Le Corbusier

Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the international style championed by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The movement was formally introduced by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and architectural theorist Robert Venturi in their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, building upon Venturi's "gentle manifesto" Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966.

The style flourished from the 1980s through the 1990s, particularly in the work of Scott Brown & Venturi, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore and Michael Graves. In the late 1990s, it divided into a multitude of new tendencies, including high-tech architecture, neo-futurism, new classical architecture, and deconstructivism. However, some buildings built after this period are still considered postmodern.

The Vanna Venturi House, one of the first prominent works of the postmodern architecture movement, is located in the neighborhood of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was designed by architect Robert Venturi for his mother, Vanna Venturi, and built between 1962 and 1964.

The five-room house stands only about 30 feet (9 m) tall, but has a monumental front facade, an effect achieved by intentionally manipulating the architectural elements that indicate a building's scale. Elements such as a non-structural applique arch and "hole in the wall" windows were an open challenge to Modernist orthodoxy, as described in Venturi's 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture .Architectural historian Vincent Scully called it "the biggest small building of the second half of the twentieth century."